Above the Law

by J. F. Freedman

  Louisa Bearpaw’s house was dark, one light on over the porch. A sheriff’s department Pathfinder was parked in the front yard next to a dusty Dodge Caravan. I pulled up next to the station wagon, the marshals right behind me. We all got out of our cars and walked to the front door. Down the street, unseen, dogs started barking, and farther off, a rooster answered with a raucous crow.

  I knocked on the door, three hard raps. For a moment, it was silent within. Then a woman’s voice, heavy with sleep, called out, “Who’s there?”

  “Luke Garrison, Mrs. Bearpaw,” I announced through the closed door. “The special prosecutor.”

  I heard some fumbling around inside; then the door opened. She was wearing a light cotton robe, wrapped tight around her. Her hair was unbraided, she was barefoot, wore no makeup.

  “What’s up?” she asked, peering through slit eyes at the six of us, four in uniform.

  “Is your son Wayne here?” I asked, looking into the house over her shoulder.

  “He’s sleeping. He worked late last night.”

  “Can we come in?”

  She could tell from my look and tone that no was not an option. “Okay,” she said, stepping aside so we could enter her small living room. “I’ll put coffee on.”

  “Don’t bother.” This from Fishell. “Would you wake your son up, please?”

  She stared at him, hands on hips. “Who are you?” She turned to me. “Who’s he?”

  “He’s the attorney general of California. Now would you wake up Wayne and tell him to come in here?”

  She cocked her head, gave me a quizzical, confrontational look. “What’s this all about, Mr. Garrison? What’s going on?”

  “Get your son,” I said curtly. “I’ll explain when he’s here.”

  She turned and walked to the back of the house.

  One of the male marshals leaned in to Fishell. “I’ll be outside,” he said quietly.

  Fishell nodded. The man let himself out, softly closing the door behind him.

  I could hear Louisa’s voice coming from a bedroom in the back of the house. Then silence.

  Fishell and I exchanged a glance. “Mrs. Bearpaw?” I called. “What’s going on?”

  The three remaining marshals unsnapped their holsters, put their hands at the ready on the butts of their automatics.

  Another thirty or forty seconds went by; then she came back into the living room. “He isn’t there,” she said with a look of surprise. “He mustn’t have come home last night.”

  “Mind if we take a look?” Fishell asked. He nodded to the marshals.

  She hesitated for a moment, then said, “Go ahead.”

  Fishell and I waited in the living room with Mrs. Bearpaw while the marshals headed for the back.

  “He isn’t here,” she repeated in an angry voice. “Don’t you believe me? What’re you doing here, anyway, this time of the morning?” She glared at me.

  “You’ll know, soon enough.”

  “I should call Sheriff Miller about this.” She went to pick up the telephone.

  “I’d prefer you didn’t,” I said, placing my hand over the telephone.

  She bristled. “Now look, Mr. Special Prosecutor. This is my house and I can do anything I want in it.”

  From the rear of the house, one of the marshals called out, “He isn’t here.”

  “See?” The woman was in my face. “Now I want you and all of you—”

  The roar of a gun being fired shook the house like an earthquake tremor. We all ran outside.

  The trail marshal had his magnum pressed up against Wayne Bearpaw’s ear. He pushed the deputy rudely against my car.

  “Spread ’em,” the marshal barked. “Now.” He grabbed Bearpaw by the belt and jerked him back, placing a leg against the deputy’s thighs, spreading his legs. With a practiced move he snapped handcuffs on Bearpaw’s wrists, behind his back. Bearpaw was bleeding from the left shoulder. A 9mm automatic lay on the ground nearby.

  “He had the weapon in his hand, he was ready to fire,” the marshal explained.

  “No problem,” Fishell assured him. “Where was he coming from?”

  The marshal pointed. “Around the back. Came out through a window. He was going to try sneaking to his vehicle, get away.”

  A few people in the nearest houses, aroused by the gunfire, were watching from a careful distance.

  Louisa ran to her son. “Are you all right?” She hovered next to him.

  He nodded, grimacing. “Stupid move,” he said under his breath.

  Fishell turned to Louisa Bearpaw. “We’re not going to cuff you, Mrs. Bearpaw, but we have to take you in. You can go inside and get dressed, but no funny business, okay? We have your son.”

  She nodded dumbly. The woman marshal escorted her into her house. Not long after, dressed in a stylish cotton dress, heels, and panty hose, makeup on, hair combed, she emerged with the female marshal. Even though she was on her way to jail, she was going to look good.

  Fishell read them their rights.

  “Are we under arrest?” Louisa asked. Her bravado wasn’t so aggressive now.

  “Yes,” I told her.

  “What for?” She came on as if she were bewildered, but I saw through her act now.

  “Perjury in front of the grand jury.” I looked over at her son. “Resisting arrest.”

  We watched as the marshals assisted mother and son into the car. “And whatever else we can hang on you,” Fishell said as the door closed on them. “Money laundering, racketeering.” As he and I walked to our car, he said to me, “And if we can prove it, accessory to murder.”

  We stopped at the county hospital to get Bearpaw patched up. His wound wasn’t bad, no arteries or bone had been hit, only muscle. After that we drove mother and son to my office, parked in back, and hustled them inside. I didn’t want anyone to know what was going on—not Tom Miller, not Nora, certainly not the press. I’d have to let Judge McBee in on what we were doing, but that could wait.

  I stashed Louisa in a room with the female marshal in attendance.

  “I want to talk to my lawyer,” Louisa demanded.

  I picked up the telephone. “What’s his number? I’ll dial it for you.”

  She glared at me. “I’d like some privacy.”

  “When your lawyer gets here, you can meet with him privately.”

  She looked away. “I…I want to talk to Sheriff Miller.”

  I shook my head. “That’s out of the question. You can talk to a lawyer, but no one else.”

  She rocked in the hard metal chair. “I can’t call the tribe’s lawyer. I can’t involve them in this, more than they already are.” She realized that what she had just said could hurt her badly. “I don’t mean we’ve done anything wrong, it’s the publicity,” she backtracked quickly, trying to cover. “Tom will know a good lawyer for me to talk to.” She looked up at me. “Has he been arrested, too?”

  “No.”

  I let her twist in the wind for a moment, then I asked, “Do you have information that might be incriminating against him?” Playing one of my hole cards, I said, “If you do, and you tell me, it could help you.”

  Could Miller be the killer, after all? He’d been there. He knew the area, he’d lived here for thirty years. And he hated Jerome. He would have loved to pull something like this off and then pin the tail on Jerome’s ass. And what about the alleged telephone calls to the compound, late at night? Could they have come from him, too? If he was in Juarez’s pocket, he’d have the number. He’d lied about where he’d gotten the money to build his house. Could Miller be in this all the way up to his neck?

  Louisa shook her head. “I don’t know anything about him that could help you.” She paused. “Or help me.”

  I told her I’d call a lawyer for her anytime she wanted. Leaving her in the custody of the woman marshal, I went into an adjoining room, where Bearpaw, his bandaged arm in a sling, was being guarded by the marshal who’d shot him. Bill Fishell joined me.

  �
��Why’d you run, man?” I asked Bearpaw.

  He was hangdogging, his head lolling between his legs. “You were going to arrest me.”

  “How’d you know that?”

  “A gypsy fortune-teller told me.” He stared up at me. “What do you think, I’m stupid? Special prosecutor shows up at six in the morning with the attorney general and four state marshals, it ain’t to wish me happy birthday.”

  “Stupid is running, so I guess you are,” I rejoined. “Where’d you think you were going to go?”

  He shook his head forlornly. “Anywhere. You give me half an hour head start, you’d never find me, dude. I’d make Eric Rudolph look like a day-hiker.”

  “You’re a police officer,” I said in disgust. “How can you even think like that?”

  He just shook his head and looked down at the floor.

  “You want a lawyer, tell me who, I’ll call him, or I’ll get you one,” I told him. “But here’s the deal: You were at the compound when Juarez was killed. I have a witness who puts you there. It’s ironclad. So that’s perjury before the grand jury, which is a crime; I’m going to indict you for it. And for resisting arrest, and pulling a gun on a peace officer. I could put you away for years on those charges alone. But knowing you were at the compound and lying about it tells me you’re involved in that killing. Now we’re talking murder.”

  I leaned in close to him.

  “You were there, you have the right kind of gun. I don’t know where you were when Juarez broke out, but I’ll make odds you were out in the woods waiting for him to come to you. Your tribe’s connected with Juarez, your mother is singing her heart out,” I lied—an easy lie, I knew he’d buy it. “My bet is that you were waiting for him. He thought you were going to help him escape. But you assassinated him instead and ran away.”

  I grabbed him by the hair, pulled his head up. “Look at me! You were there! You know that terrain like the back of your hand, it’s right next to your reservation. You’ve probably hunted there a million times, camped out, fucked there.”

  I let go of him. He collapsed. I turned to Fishell. “I’m bringing an indictment against him. For the murder of Reynaldo Juarez. I’ll go see the judge, right now.”

  I turned to leave. I could hear Bearpaw rustling in his chair. Walking slowly to the door, I thought to myself, stop me, man. I’ve done my part, now you do yours.

  “Wait a minute.”

  My hand hadn’t even reached the doorknob.

  He crooned better than Elvis.

  “I was there,” he confessed. “After I told Sheriff Miller I was leaving, I circled around and snuck up from the back side. Nobody saw me.” He shook his head disdainfully. “All that bullshit from Jerome about knowing where everyone was? Jerome didn’t know jack shit, he was so fucking hyper he couldn’t count the fingers on his hands.”

  “Go on,” I prompted.

  “These trailers they were using to lock the prisoners in? They got them from county welfare. I’ve been in those trailers. They’ve got these little trapdoors in the back, for fire escapes. You can open those locks with a pocketknife.”

  I listened, enraptured. All the pieces of the puzzle were fitting, finally.

  “You freed him.”

  He nodded. “I watched until I saw Jerome leave the trailer. He was being sloppy, he left Juarez alone in there—he was hogging the glory, he didn’t want anyone else near his prize. Which was lucky for me, otherwise I’d have had to try some intricate diversion, which might not have worked. But I was able to sneak in and unlock the cuffs. Anyone could’ve unlocked them, they’re standard issue.”

  “I know,” I said. “Go on.”

  “I told him to wait a couple minutes, until I could create a diversion. It wasn’t going to be much, just enough to give him a jump. Once he took off, he was on his own. He’d planned it out in advance, in case something like this ever happened. Where he was going to run to, and who was going to meet him there to help him get away.”

  “And that’s what happened.”

  He nodded grimly. “That’s what happened.”

  “And you got there first, and murdered him.”

  He shook his head violently. “No way, man! I cut him loose, that’s all. I wasn’t anywheres near that murder scene.”

  “What about the phone calls to the compound? Did you make them?”

  Another head-shake. “No. I didn’t know the number.”

  I sat on the edge of the table, looking at him closely. “Was Sheriff Miller involved in any of this? Was he Juarez’s secret accomplice?”

  “No, man,” he said indignantly. “Sheriff Miller’s straight as a ruler. He didn’t know shit about any of this.”

  “Does he know you’re dirty?”

  He was in pain now. “No.”

  “It’s going to hurt him to find out.”

  The look on Bearpaw’s face was indescribable. “It’s going to kill him.” He gave me this sickly smile. “You don’t know, do you?”

  “Know what?”

  “About Sheriff Miller and my mother.”

  Fishell and I exchanged a look. Wasn’t this already crazy enough?

  “What about them?” I asked. I almost didn’t want to know, especially if Miller wasn’t involved in Juarez’s killing, or with Juarez in general.

  “They’re lovers. They’ve been lovers forever, way before his wife died. She was a cold bitch, his wife. She hated living out here, she hated him for fucking up his FBI career. My mother was good to him. A real woman, what he needed. And he was great to her.” He paused. “He still is.”

  Fishell and I gave each other looks of pure disbelief. “Now I’ve heard everything,” I said.

  Bearpaw shook his head. “No, you haven’t.” Then he smiled.

  “Sheriff Tom Miller is my father.”

  Once Louisa Bearpaw knew her son had broken, she came clean, too.

  Juarez, through an emissary, had contacted her when he decided to buy the land next to the reservation. They were supporters of Native American causes, they told her, and they wanted to help her tribe. In exchange, the tribe could do them a service. It would work out well for both sides.

  “The service being to launder their money.”

  “I prefer the phrase ‘invest in our future.’ We weren’t involved in dealing drugs,” she said self-righteously, as if being once removed whitewashed the crime. “I wouldn’t cross that line.”

  I felt dirty, listening to this ugly, self-serving excuse. “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”

  “Precisely.” She wasn’t going to back down an inch.

  “How much did Juarez invest in your future?”

  My irony was a gnat on an elephant’s ass to her. “Twenty million dollars a year. It wasn’t much to them, they spread their money around.”

  “Investing in futures. Especially their own.”

  “One hand washes the other.”

  “And both get dirty.”

  I was getting angrier and angrier—the woman had no remorse, and seemingly, no comprehension of the consequences of her actions. “What did the tribe get out of it? How much of his bloody money did it take to corrupt you?”

  “We kept five points.” She was talking as if we were in an accounting seminar. “And we weren’t corrupted. We were never in the drug business.”

  “A million a year. No taxes, of course. That’s five million, so far. Which is where you got the money to buy the compound.”

  She gave me a savvy look. “Once Juarez was dead and the government took the property, we had to do something. They weren’t going to be around anymore, our revenue had dried up. We needed the money,” she said matter-of-factly. “Gambling’s legit, it would solve all our problems.”

  “And how much of it did you skim?”

  “Nothing,” she said angrily. “Not one dime. It all went to the betterment of my people.”

  “The betterment of your people. That’s a wonderful excuse.” I paced around the desk. “Does Tom Miller know about any of
this? He’s your financial adviser, isn’t he?” I gave her a hard look. “Among other things.” She knew her son had told me about her and Miller.

  She smiled. “He isn’t, really. He plays with a little bit of our money. It makes him feel good, necessary. He’s a trend-follower, but he’s not in this league.”

  “Not many are. What’s going to happen when he finds out?”

  “He’ll be hurt.”

  “Hurt? That’s all? He’s a lifer cop, you betrayed the heart and soul of what he believes in.”

  The glare she gave me would melt icebergs. “Life isn’t always tidy, Mr. Garrison. I have no regrets about anything I did. We’ve been poor for a hundred and fifty years, ever since you stole our land from us, stole our lives. Drugs aren’t the worst thing that’s ever happened, Indians have been doing hallucinogens forever, it’s part of our religion: It hasn’t killed us. Poverty, disease, high infant mortality, alcoholism, all the shit you gave us—those are real calamities. Who cares, if some bored Anglo housewife in the San Fernando Valley wants to snort powder up her nose, or a junkie in Chicago chooses to smoke crack? What business is that of mine? My people are my business. And I was helping them. You don’t like it, give me back my country and I’ll abide by my own laws.”

  I backed away from her. She could be contagious. “Tom Miller isn’t your people.”

  “He’ll understand,” she said unwaveringly. “He’s seen the poverty up close for thirty years. You’d be surprised:”

  I already was.

  “What are you going to do now?” she asked. “There’s no records of the money, we’ve been super-careful, you’ll never get us on that. And I didn’t kill Juarez, and neither did Wayne. Reynaldo was our savior. I cried when I heard he’d been killed.”

  “Who did kill him, then?” By now I was almost positive I knew who it was, but when you’re in the middle of the lake already, it doesn’t cost anything to throw out another line.

  “Jerome,” she said with certainty. “You’ve got him dead to rights.”

  Whether I did or not, she was bullshitting me. Even now, after she’d caught both tits in the wringer.

  “You’d want it to be Jerome.”

  “Jerome cut down my money tree. Of course I want it to be him. It is him,” she declared fiercely. “It has to be.”